How, though, did al-Khalidi arrive at the term “asqāmah” in his rendering of ijmā‘? As noted, Jews in the medieval Islamic world, especially the later Geonim and even Maimonides, appear to have been influenced by the Islamic principle of ijmā‘.104 The term, however, was not typically translated into Jewish discourse as haskamah. While the specific source for al-Khalidi’s use of this term has proved elusive, certain possibilities present themselves. The Hebrew term haskamah, (pl. haskamot), literally “agreement,” has had various technical usages over the centuries. For instance, printed Hebrew books beginning in the early modern period would often have a letter from a well-known and respected rabbi at the end of the volume; with the advent of title pages in the sixteenth century, such letters began to appear at opening of books. This letter, known as a haskamah, would serve as an imprimatur, offering praise for the book and its author and assuring, if not the highest quality of scholarship, at least a religiously inoffensive work. Haskamot would often also operate as copyrights, threatening with excommunication those who might, within a certain period of time after publication, reproduce the work without permission.105
A second technical usage of haskamah, or more precisely, of ascama, with the initial ‘h’ unpronounced, was current among Sephardim, Jews of Spanish origin for whom an “h,” as in Spanish, would generally be silent. In Sephardic parlance, an ascama was the set of laws governing a Jewish community’s internal administration, essentially the by-laws of a semiautonomous religious community or, later, of a particular synagogue.106 Having encountered Sephardic Jews not only in Jerusalem but also in France and Istanbul, perhaps al-Khalidi had heard this term. Or he might well have seen the Jewish Encyclopedia’s entry entitled “Ascama,” which mentions these two variant usages of the term. But neither variant precisely matches the sense that al-Khalidi attaches to the term.107
Perhaps al-Khalidi learned the term from his Hebrew-speaking acquaintance in Palestine, eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the renowned enthusiast for the revival of Hebrew as a modern spoken language for the Jews of Palestine. While the possibility is surely tantalizing—after all, we know from Ben-Yehuda’s interview with al-Khalidi that they knew each other fairly well—it is problematic. The particular meaning al-Khalidi attributes to the term appears to have been unknown to Ben-Yehuda (whose personal lexicon is discernible to an extent unique to the compilers of dictionaries). In his comprehensive Hebrew dictionary, Ben-Yehuda identified five senses of the word haskamah,108 none of which precisely corresponds to al-Khalidi’s intended meaning. For now, al-Khalidi’s source for the term remains something of a mystery.
What we have found here, I suggest, is that even in al-Khalidi’s internal and sensitive reading of Jewish history, he read this history from the perspective of one whose understanding of religious systems is grounded in Islam. The Islamic shade of al-Khalidi’s theory of Jewish history is perfectly natural, not only because of the multitude of similarities and parallels between the religious-legal structures of Judaism and Islam,109 but also because one inevitably perceives others through the paradigms of reality with which one has been endowed by one’s culture.
The latter is an insight that has been compellingly explored in the field of translation studies. Lawrence Venuti argues:
Translation never communicates in an untroubled fashion because the translator negotiates the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text by reducing them and supplying another set of differences, basically domestic, drawn from the receiving language and culture to enable the foreign to be received there. The foreign text, then, is not so much communicated as inscribed with domestic intelligibilities and interests.110
In the course of translating a text from one language into another, according to Venuti, the translator cannot simply or seamlessly “communicate” the text or its content into a new language. The imagined, “literal translation” ideal-type is necessarily an impossibility because of the inevitable differences between the languages and their corresponding cultures. The translator must negotiate these differences in order to render the text into the new language. Venuti labels this not “communication” but “inscription,” where the foreign is “inscribed with domestic intelligibilities and interests.” Al-Khalidi’s overall project in this manuscript may indeed be understood as one of translation: to translate Jewish history and Zionism into Arabic, making use of non-Arabic sources. In so doing, al-Khalidi “inscribes” Judaism “with domestic intelligibilities and interests,” and this example of asqāmah–ijmāʿ is an acute case of this process. As al-Khalidi works to understand the course of Jewish history, he inscribes onto Judaism his (and his audience’s) preconceptions and assumptions, from a knowledge of Islam, about how religions function. Asqāmah may thus be seen as al-Khalidi’s domestication of the Islamic ijmā‘.
Complicating the standard notion of translation, this case problematizes the presumed direction of translation, showing the ability (or even inevitability) of the receiving language and culture to impose its assumptions on that which is ostensibly translated. This case suggests that a translator might not only inscribe domestic meaning onto the foreign text but actually inscribe the domestic concept into the foreign text. This discussion further highlights the issue of interreligious translation: that is, the translation not simply between languages but between religions as well. In translating Jewish history into Arabic in Late Ottoman Palestine, al-Khalidi translates Islam into Judaism, interpreting the Jews’ internal history from the perspective of one whose understanding of religious systems is grounded in Islam.
What is critical to stress, though, and what is too often overlooked in the scholarship on this period, is that in the encounter between Zionists and Arabs (be they Muslim or Christian) in Palestine, there was an encounter between individuals of different religions who, to some extent at least, understood each other in religious terms (and on their own religious terms); these religious terms were critical to al-Khalidi’s “intelligibilities and interests.” Ignoring religion, then, prohibits the scholar from recognizing and analyzing some of the most fundamental tools of understanding, or misunderstanding, with which these individuals and communities operated.
NAVIGATING BETWEEN SYMPATHY AND FEAR
Thus far we have seen the extent to which al-Khalidi turns to Jewish history in his effort to understand the modern phenomenon of Zionism. Al-Khalidi accepts the biblical and ancient Jewish narratives of two independent Israelite commonwealths in Palestine, and he acknowledges the subsequent, persistent hope of a return to the Holy Land. Of Jewish messianic expectation in the Talmud, he writes that the rabbis of the Jews repeatedly predicted this time, and the Jews repeated in their prayers and at the end of every one of their Zionist congresses the holy Hebrew phrase the Arabic translation of which is:
“Next year in Jerusalem [al-Quds].”
This indicates their affection for111 Palestine and the extent of their desire to possess it.112
For al-Khalidi—relying as he does on Jewish sources as he traces the Jews’ historic link to Palestine—the contemporary Zionist congresses are just the latest manifestations of the ancient aspiration articulated in the “holy Hebrew” prayer for “Next year in Jerusalem.” This aspiration extends back to Sabbateanism, the medieval Jewish poets, the Talmud, Bar Kokhba, and, originally, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible themselves. For the son and nephew of Jerusalem mayors, and for one of Jerusalem’s representatives in the Ottoman Parliament, Jews’ “affection for Palestine,” and especially for Jerusalem, must have been at once eerily familiar and profoundly threatening. Yet al-Khalidi does not withhold this information from his intended readers. Nor does he even question the legitimacy of the Jews’ attachment to the land, except in the modern period when, as we have seen, he contends that the Jews themselves declared their former ambition null and void through a religious-legal pronouncement.
However, al-Khalidi does not limit his exposition of Judaism and Jewish history to the Jews’ attachment to Palestine. Rather, h
is manuscript investigates a wide assortment of aspects of Jewish faith and experience. In the pages that follow, I explore the ways in which al-Khalidi’s understanding of Judaism is informed by the centuries-old tradition of Islamic-Jewish polemics, on the one hand, and by very contemporary, pressing concerns about Palestine and Zionist ambitions, on the other. Despite its bold attempt to synthesize all Jewish history, al-Khalidi’s manuscript is indeed well titled, for “the Zionist question,” when not the explicit subject, is generally perceptible just beneath the surface. This is the case, as well, in al-Khalidi’s ambivalent attempt to explain European antisemitism. As I will argue, in addressing Russian Christians’ hatred of Jews, al-Khalidi undertakes the treacherous task of sensitively accounting for a bigotry that has resulted not only in the victimization of the Jews but also in the Jews’ efforts to take control of al-Khalidi’s homeland. Al-Khalidi struggles to navigate between his sympathy for a mistreated people and his resentment of those very people. Especially when focusing his analysis on the Jews’ role in the economy, he at times accepts antisemitic claims as he watches Jews gradually acquiring his homeland by means of their seemingly endless supply of capital. From his vantage point in Jerusalem and Istanbul, al-Khalidi found himself wondering whether some of the blame for antisemitism might belong to the Jews themselves.
QUESTIONING JEWISH FAITH IN AN AFTERLIFE
Let us now look more closely at al-Khalidi’s treatment of Jewish faith and religion. In the course of his extended account of the books of the Hebrew Bible, which al-Khalidi undertakes so that the reader will have the necessary background to understand the biblical roots of Zionism that Gottheil identifies at the opening of his encyclopedia article, al-Khalidi concludes the following:
So the Jews do not anticipate reward or punishment after death for their service and their deeds because the prophets of the Children of Israel did not promise them compensation for their deeds other than worldly, earthly, physical happiness.113 In some phrases of the Torah, there is allusion to the future life, but this allusion is not as clear as it was to the ancient Egyptians who professed an accounting and punishment after death.
Acknowledging a verse from the book of Daniel (12:2) that declares that “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,” al-Khalidi insists that “in this expression, there is a hint of the resurrection114 but there is no elucidation of it nor is there insistence upon it as there is in the Holy Gospels [al-injīl ash-sharīf] and the Holy Qurʾan, in terms of verses and proofs that are mentioned repeatedly,” several of which al-Khalidi proceeds to quote.115
Though al-Khalidi does not typically cite his sources in this work,116 he does do so in this case. For the general notion that the Jews do not have a firm belief in reward and punishment or in an afterlife, al-Khalidi points to a thirteenth- to fourteenth-century Muslim historical compiler, Abu al-Fidaʾ, who in turn quotes Abu al-Fath Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karim ash-Shahrastani (d. 1153–1154). A Persian-born Sunni Muslim, ash-Shahrastani wrote Kitāb al-milal wa-n-niḥal (The Book of Religions and Systems of Thought, c. 1127–1128), comparing the other religions of his day to Islam. For al-Khalidi’s comparison of the Torah’s relative silence on the afterlife as compared to the ancient Egyptian faith, he cites a contemporary 1878 French work on the ancient history of the peoples of the Orient by Emmanuel van den Berg.117 These two sources—ash-Shahrastani and van den Berg—are illustrative of al-Khalidi’s dual education: in the Arab-Islamic tradition, on the one hand, and the nineteenth-century European Orientalist tradition, on the other.
Beyond showing the sources for al-Khalidi’s understanding of Judaism, however, this passage also reveals a telling choice of focus and terms of comparison. Al-Khalidi’s decision to highlight the absence of the concept of the afterlife and resurrection in the Hebrew Bible, and the lack of the doctrine of reward-and-punishment, was not accidental, I would suggest, nor without particular resonance. Rather, this was a conventional trope of Muslim-Jewish polemics from the medieval period, and it has clear roots in the Qurʾan.118 Indeed, the second sura of the Qurʾan emphasizes the centrality of the principle of the afterlife; it actually identifies the Qurʾan as a guide for the righteous who “have firm faith in the Hereafter” (Q. 2:4).119 In the Qurʾan, belief in divine judgment on the Last Day is critical for the self-definition of the believer, and in defining the nonbelieving Other:
As for those who disbelieve … God has sealed their hearts and their ears, and their eyes are covered. They will have great torment. Some people say, “We believe in God and the Last Day,” when really they do not believe. They seek to deceive God and the believers but they only deceive themselves. (Q. 2:6–9)
In the ninth sura of the Qurʾan, we read of the call to “fight those of the People of the Book who do not [truly] believe in God and the Last Day” (Q. 9:29). Jews, of course, are among Islam’s People of the Book, ahl al-kitāb, and yet, al-Khalidi insists, in the tradition of the Qurʾan and subsequent polemics in the Muslim-Jewish ideological encounter, Jews do not believe in the Last Day on which divine judgment will be meted out to all.120 This assessment of Judaism would certainly have resonated with Muslim readers of al-Khalidi’s text.
The presence within al-Khalidi’s manuscript of conventional Islamic anti-Jewish tropes, though, does not necessarily imply that his “as-Sayūnīzm” should itself be viewed as a religious polemic. Identifying the genre of al-Khalidi’s text is a difficult task, both because of its composite nature (at times, as noted, it is a synthesis of unattributed sources) and because it generally presents itself in what seems like an objective, textbook style. The question here is, in part, one of intentionality: when al-Khalidi employed anti-Jewish themes and tropes, did he do so consciously in order to engage in an act of polemics, or was he simply utilizing and imparting his own conception of Judaism that was unselfconsciously informed by such polemics? Given the methodological challenges of determining authorial intent, this question cannot be answered with certainty, but we might safely conclude that the text is operating within a rich tradition and language of discourse concerning Judaism that do have religious polemical qualities, regardless of whether al-Khalidi intended them as such.
REALIGNING INTERRELIGIOUS POLEMICS IN PALESTINE
In al-Khalidi’s passage on the absence of discussion of the afterlife, resurrection, and ultimate reward-and-punishment in the Jewish scriptures, Judaism is not contrasted with Islam exclusively. Rather, the points of comparison are Islam and Christianity. While al-Khalidi only makes passing reference to the “Holy Gospels,” it is clear that in this “us-and-them” statement, Christians are part of his “us.” Al-Khalidi’s linking of Christianity to Islam is not to be taken lightly. After all, the tradition of Muslim-Christian polemics is at least as extensive and severe as that of Muslim-Jewish polemics.121 It begins, as does its Muslim-Jewish counterpart, in the Qurʾan itself. “Those who say, ‘God is the Messiah, the son of Mary,’ are defying the truth” (Q. 5:17). And later, within the same sura, “unbelievers” are identified as “those who say that God is the third of three.” The Qurʾan contends, rather, that “there is only One God,” and if these unbelievers “persist in what they are saying, a painful punishment will afflict those of them who persist.” Once more emphasizing this point, the sura continues that “the Messiah, son of Mary, was only a messenger; other messengers had come and gone before him; his mother was a virtuous woman; both ate food [like other mortals]. See how clear We make these signs for them; see how deluded they are” (Q. 5:73–75). Scholars have enumerated five aspects of Christianity rejected by the Qurʾan: Jesus and Mary as gods, man as a “son” of God, tritheism, complete identity between Jesus and God, and al-masīḥ (the messiah, i.e., Christ) being independent of God.122 While the Qurʾan does offer a certain degree of praise of Jesus and Christianity in its imagined precorrupted form, later medieval Muslim perceptions of Christianity were more uniformly unsympathetic. Medieval Muslims, according to Jacques Waardenburg, “identified Christianity as a
religion opposed to Islam as a religion; the truths of these two religions were thought to be mutually exclusive.”123 Muslim polemicists attacked Christianity for the latter’s forgery of scripture, its errors of thought and doctrine (including the notions of incarnation, the trinity, and original sin), and its faults in religious practice (especially for its alleged idol worship and its laxity in circumcision and other aspects of ritual purity).124
Muslim anti-Christian writings, moreover, did not cease in the medieval period. They continued into al-Khalidi’s own day, and not exclusively among the religiously conservative. Such prominent late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Muslim thinkers as the reformer Muhammad ʿAbduh (whose notion of evolving ijmāʿ was discussed above) and his younger, more politically oriented collaborator Muhammad Rashid Rida—both contemporaries and acquaintances of al-Khalidi—wrote extensively on and against Christianity. ʿAbduh’s al-Islām wa-n-naṣrāniyya maʿ al-ʿilm wa-l-madaniyya (Islam and Christianity with [reference to] Science and Civilization) challenged the purported rationality of Christianity (in contrast to Islam’s alleged irrationality), and Rida’s Shubuhāt an-naṣārā wa-ḥujaj al-islām (The Specious Arguments of the Christians [against Islam] and the Proofs of Islam) set out to highlight the polytheistic contaminations of Christianity.125 Al-Khalidi’s apparent desire to see the unity of Islam and Christianity is thus most remarkable as it is at odds with a long history of opposition. On the fundamental religious issues, al-Khalidi’s comment suggests, Christians and Muslims are in accord, in contrast to Jews.
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